


Deepen to a burn

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Romance, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Anxiety Disorder, Dubious Consent, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:48:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21675535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: When she sees his eyes the sting deepens to a burn.
Relationships: Harry Greenwood & Charmed Ones, Harry Greenwood & Macy Vaughn, Harry Greenwood/Macy Vaughn
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	Deepen to a burn

**Author's Note:**

> So Dark!Harry (who needs his own tag because he honestly feels like a totally different character) needed to be with us longer. That was interesting, intense and every kinda screwed up.

Deepen to a burn

Macy flinches away from his touch. It’s involuntary, barely perceptible, but she does it all the same. She doesn’t want to, likes Harry’s firm, gentle fingers on her flesh, but she cannot help it. Dammit. That’s another thing that Dark Harry took from her, then, along with her peace of mind, confidence in her friends and that huge, heaping chunk he bit out of her sanity.

It stings her to see the hurt in his eyes when he reaches out and her muscles tense, however briefly. The sting deepens to a burn when that hurt softens into understanding. He knows why she cannot bear a touch that has been precious to her before, that she still fucking yearns for at the bottom of her bottoms, and that may be the worst thing of all that Dark Harry (Darry? She’s still not sure about that one.) took from her. It is a sense of assurance in herself. If she cannot trust her own heart, the reactions of her own body… who can she trust?

So she locks herself away with the witchboard on her shifts to watch it--lengthened, now, to eight hours since Maggie has a full time job--and doodles scratchy sigils on a pad of yellowed onionskin she found in an unmarked cabinet at the back of the Elders’ hideaway. It is the perfect paper on which to write spells and Macy has dedicated herself to that. Primordial demon powers are awesome and all but Mel’s blossoming into a full blown kitchen witch, a homebrew Professor Snape of the highest order, has been too and Macy would like to find her own way to advance as a witch and not just a tactical nuclear weapon.

So she scrawls sigils on the rough paper. Words do not come easy for Macy. Even since she overcame her stammer in freshman intro to biology they are not a friend the way numbers and symbols are. Spells, therefore, she thought would be best left the province of other witches more felicitous with language. A book called Liber Null, tucked away at the back of another cabinet in their headquarters, has changed her thinking on that. The Elders, apparently, had some really cool toys. How, with all that information at their fingertips, had they succeeded only in being such colossal dickheads?

The universe is a chaotic pattern of patterns swirling towards entropy and the eventual heat death of all things. Invisible quantum interactions govern what does and does not happen, when and where. Up is up and down is likewise down because of common consent but it does not have to be so, is not always, and in a truly infinite spiral might not even be predominantly outside of her own perception. This is the first lesson that Macy, a neophyte chaote, takes from the book of nothing. God is real and the real is god, but neither is a tyrant unless she allows it.

So she scratches sigils on the onionskin. Even the subtlest quanta might change much after all, and what she needs is not so very far-fetched. She has lost so much but it is all invisible and her etchings to rebuild order from the shattered chaos in her psyche are plain to see and so already stronger and more real than that which has been taken. She believes it, has to believe it, or it won’t work--so says the book, so says nothing. She has to believe that Harry won’t betray her, that her sisters won’t abandon her, that her demon side won’t make her go berserk and kill everyone she loves. The fears are not real because they have not been carved anywhere but the dark, secret places of her soul.

She is so absorbed in her work when Harry enters to start his shift that she does not even notice him pull up a chair and sit beside her. “Hello,” he says. It’s soft, respectful, charged with none of the familiarity she wants. Another debt Dark Harry (she will not call him Darry and let him ruin The Outsiders for her, too--she won’t) owes.

“Hey,” she says back. “Is it already eleven?”

“It is.”

She blinks. “I had no idea that being a Charmed One and saving the witches of the world would be so much like having an office job where I sit behind a desk all day. You know, the kind of job I went all the way through getting a PhD and going to work in research to avoid.”

He smiles. “Well, you do get to chase the occasional demon and shoot fire at them. That’s not too common in office jobs, unless I’m greatly mistaken.”

“You have a point. Unless we’re talking about the job I had as an administrative assistant in the biology department at Western Michigan. I’m fairly sure that my boss, the chair’s executive assistant, was a pretty high level Carnal. That lady…” She shudders. “Anyway, I guess I’m gonna head to bed. Not that I’m gonna sleep or anything.”

“You’ve been suffering from insomnia?”

“Insomnia, early stages of PTSD.” She shrugs. “Six of one, half a dozen.”

“That’s a serious thing to shrug off with a bad joke.”

“Good thing I did it with an awesome joke, then,” she says. When he frowns and furrows his brow in the super cute way that she loves Macy goes on: “It’s not something I can really do anything about right now. It’s not as if being a Charmed One has a mental health plan in our benefits package and if I take something to help me sleep my groggy ass might be too slow in a fight to save some innocent witch, or might even get you or Mel or Maggie hurt.”

“You can’t keep this up forever,” he says. “Lack of sleep will eventually kill you as surely as a demon’s claws.”

“I know,” she says. “I know. But whenever I close my eyes and try to sleep I see… well… you know what I see.”

“I do.” He falls silent for a long moment. “Charmed Ones may not have a mental health benefits program but you could talk about it with one of your sisters. You could talk about it with me.”

“I…” Her face reflects the agony she can feel twisting her gut. “I can’t. Not right now. I want to, I really do, but I just can’t.”

“I understand,” he says. “I’m here for you when you are able.”

“Thank you.” She gathers Liber Null and her papers into a messy stack so that she can spread them out on the bed and start working again throughout a sleepless night. “Maybe I can shift the quanta of our universe enough that I can open up to you tomorrow… because the universe where I can’t sucks serious donkey.”

“Go,” he says. “Go and rest at least, if you cannot sleep. The quanta and I can wait for you a hundred years if we must.”

She does not want to wait a hundred years and does not want to sleep so she falls to work and maintains her scribbling at a frantic pace until numb fingers lose their grip on her pencil. She blinks away sleep for long moments but it claims her, finally, for fitful dreams of a handsome face that burns her with the intensity of its desire but that she cannot look away from. She does not want to wait a hundred years, does not want to wait a single second, and in her dreams she does not. In her dreams she hates every second of it and hates that handsome face and the fire within almost as much as she loves it.


End file.
